The Gogol-St. Petersburg Nexus
From Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century to Andrei Bitov in the twentieth, St. Petersburg functions as a critical element in Russian literature and social thought. The great nineteenth-century prose writer and playwright Nikolai Gogol strikingly embodies motifs and themes associated with Russia’s great yet dysfunctional and, ultimately, erstwhile capital city. Gogol is especially celebrated for his fragmented and surreal images, his sense of a terrifying void lurking beneath an apparently solid surface reality and his dehumanized characters, all of which are linked with the city of St. Petersburg. The reader encounters these elements from Gogol’s first tales, embedded in his native Ukraine. They will figure significantly in such St. Petersburg stories as “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.” Most importantly, even those later works not set in St. Petersburg – his play The Inspector General and his unfinished novel Dead Souls – incorporate features peculiar to Gogol’s reading of a terrifying and, in the end, alien urban environment. For Gogol, St. Petersburg betokens the void, a deceptive superficial reality, and a blurring of the boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Carried further, Gogol uses his reading of St. Petersburg symbolism to blur the line between the living and the dead, with damnation lying just beneath an illusory surface reality of an evil Westernized city founded by the tsar who led Russia away from traditional values. His characters embody this Westernized capital city and carry it around with themselves even in provincial settings far away from its dangerous glitter.